KYW Flashback: The Garden State Park Race Track Fire
PHILADELPHIA (CBS) --- A wooden grandstand packed with 10,000 racing fans and a kitchen fire became an inferno, seared into Delaware Valley memories as the Garden State Park race track sent towering flames into the sky over Cherry Hill.
It was April 14th, 1977 and KYW's first South Jersey Bureau Chief Dick Standish described the loss of a landmark.
"If you can imagine the whole grandstand area, from one end to the other totally in flames - the flames twice the size of the grandstand."
The impact of the loss which claimed three lives was vividly captured in a dramatic photograph by KYW's Bill Roswell. It portrays a horse and rider, fully ablaze, atop the track weather vane.
